Asus ROG teaser video shows the first Ryzen-powered laptop

Set to be unveiled at Computex

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for AMD. First, its Ryzen 9 “Threadripper” CPU lineup was leaked, this was followed by the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition unveiling, and a few days ago the company said Ryzen-powered laptops would launch in the third quarter of this year. Now, Asus has teased the first Ryzen notebook on its Republic of Gamers YouTube page.

Other than Ryzen’s circular orange logo and the ROG brand, the video doesn’t offer any specifics of what hardware the machine will feature. The clip includes the words “something has awakened,” and, most importantly, the description under the video includes the hashtag #Computex2017. The Taipei event kicks off on May 30, so it’s not long before Asus shows the laptop off to the world.

As this is a ROG product, you can expect it to be gamer-focused. AMD’s Ryzen-based APUs come with Radeon Vega graphics cores, but with the recently revealed Frontier - set for release in late June - aimed at enterprise use, it could be closer to the end of Q3 (September) before we see Vega-based consumer GPUs and mobile chips.

As PCWorld points out, this means it’ll either be many months after Computex before Asus’ mysterious laptop launches or it uses an unannounced mobile variant of the standard Ryzen CPU. Or, maybe consumer Vega will be here a lot sooner than anyone expected.

Compared to AMD’s 7th generation Bristol Ridge APUs, Ryzen-based laptops boast a 40-percent improvement in GPU performance and a 50-percent increase in CPU performance, all while using just half the power.